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Bankruptcy

THE BANKRUPTCY OF POST-MODERN LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC SECULAR CONSUMERIST TECHNOCRACY: WHO SAYS THAT THE MANAGEMENT MODEL OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IS AS OUT TO LUNCH AS ALL THAT?

We all hear in the popular media about scandals in the Roman Catholic Church and how out of touch this organization supposedly is with today’s world: It doesn’t let priests marry, it won’t ordain women, and it won’t let homosexuals live their sexual orientation in the open or marry openly in the Church . Boy, is it ever out of touch with reality, eh?

But wait a minute! The Roman Catholic Church has been around for over 2000 years, and it shows no signs of weakness in the face of the secular-humanist onslaught of ‘flavour of the month’ political causes. Let’s not forget that Christ himself said to St. Peter: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it’. In fact the Church continues to grow in the emerging world, in places such as Africa and Asia, where these societies have yet to be affected by such glorious ‘developments’, such as ‘prosperity’, ‘consumerism’, and ‘technocracy’.

It is in fact such things as technocracy, with its big-spending on government services, trying to be everything to everybody, that has largely contributed to the decline of western civilization. We’ve become so obsessed with maintaining a material standard of living which is essentially beyond our means, that we’re ready, willing and able to take on levels of personal and national indebtedness which threaten to demolish the very economic, social, political, and moral foundations upon which our civilization was founded.

This has all occurred in the space of only a few hundred years at most. One can trace back the genesis of the current societal malaise to the advent of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late 1770s. This is when scientific advances, coupled with a desire to transform society into an urban, industrial society, based on the production and consumption of goods produced in factories, became the dominant hegemonic form of socio-political and socio-economic discourse. As well, it became the new method of wealth-creation, thereby supplanting the feudal system, which heretofore had been the dominant form of wealth creation, through the control of land and its development.

Fast-forward the clock to the Second World War, and we find western civilization on the cusp of a new era of mass production and mass consumption. This was a formula which had taken at least a couple of hundred years to perfect, including two world wars in the twentieth century, a couple of stock market crashes along the way, one Great Depression, a few genocides, and countless boom and bust cycles in the economy, as the lords of high finance indulged their fancy in various forms of blood-letting, and market speculation.

This all led us to the supposedly marvellous post-war period of peace, prosperity, and abundance of all things material. In fact what it had led to was the exhaustion of the moral and spiritual wellspring of western civilization’s human potential. We now found ourselves as a society increasingly bereft of spiritual meaning and vision, left to put our ‘faith’ in the increasingly grandiose promises of secular-humanist technocracy, which promised us better things and better times ahead, if we just surrendered our will and our lives to Big Brother, all would be well.

Well, it looks like in a matter of 65 years after WWII, technocracy is not only economically bankrupt, but morally as well. Scandals keep multiplying on Wall Street, or in the headlines of the political news in Québec city, or elsewhere in Canada. The U.S. government is for all intents and purposes on the brink of bankruptcy. The Québec government is so far in debt that it risks getting its credit rating downgraded soon if it doesn’t do something about the situation. Greece is all but bankrupt after decades of profligate spending, and the disease is spreading to Spain, Portugal, and Italy.

But what about the Roman Catholic Church? Do we hear anything about the Church being in a financial crisis? I don’t think so! Last time I checked, many clerics still took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and all of their worldly wealth was pooled into the common property of their community. The thought of individual gain is virtually non existent. The greater good of the Church and the glory of the God it defends and promotes are far more important than such other middling considerations as personal aggrandizement.

We can therefore conclude that the Roman Catholic Church has not survived for over 2000 years for lack of an efficient and upstanding management model. I would argue, on the other hand, that it is rather the transient, ethereal, and ephemeral realities, false promises and sterile moral and spiritual basis which constitutes post-modern liberal democratic, secular-humanistic technocratic consumerist civilization which are rather at fault.

These factors, much more than the transgressions of a certain number of God’s representatives on earth, which are the root cause of what ails our society. Many argue ‘if there is a God, why are there so many wars and suffering in this world?’. The only answer that I have to that is that God has already sent us His prophets to inform us as to how to live, to love and to pray. He even sent His only begotten Son to tell us to love one another and to do unto others as we would have done unto us.

Yet people still persist on insisting on doing their own will, and not the will of God, pursuing the earthly goals of money, power, property, and prestige, instead of loving one another. Therefore the wars and the hatred continue, because people will it to be so, even going as far as invoking His name in carrying out many such deeds of violence in the pursuit of material gain. Such has been the history of humanity since the dawn of time.

However, as men and women of God and of His Church, we are bound by His Commandments, and to obey them to the best of our ability. The Church may seem out of step with the post-modern world, but it is still clearly the Rock upon which all of civilization continues to be edified, regardless of whether said civilization happens to be plugging homosexuality one decade or another, married clergy at some other point, women’s ordination somewhere else down the road the next decade, or whatever else those ‘progressive’ people can dream up in their crystal ball based on whatever pet social cause happens to be on some lobby group’s agenda at any particular point in space and time.

She is our Rock of Ages, keeper of all the sacred traditions of our civilization. To her, the Mother Church, we pledge enduring fealty and allegiance. Long may she live for another 2000 years!